Traveling

” A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.”

These are the words of a tree in Richard Powers’ beautiful novel, The Overstory.  The story reveals how trees communicate with us and create community, supporting each other wherever they are planted. It’s a story that is giving me hope in these days of COVID-19 social isolation.

It gives me hope as I worry about the incarcerated men who have participated in our book clubs. I imagine them in their cells, living for a month now in lockdown, traveling in the freedom of their minds wherever their imagination can take them. I pray their imagination takes them to beautiful green spaces, full of trees that call them by name and seek to commune with them and support them.

It gives me hope as I reflect on the ways I am currently seeking and valuing community now more than ever. I could do without the grief and anxiety of a global pandemic, but I am grateful for the lessons I am learning: lessons about how to better conserve food and household resources, lessons about what work matters most and what can be let go, lessons about our interdependence as humanity, lessons about how our care for creatures and creation profoundly affects our human lives.

We are all holding physically still in this moment. And yet we can travel everywhere in hope and prayer and imagination. I pray for us to imagine beauty and supportive community. I pray we live into what we imagine for the sake of God’s creation.

[Photo Credit: Gordon Wrigley]